Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcis­sistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship.

Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.

But one observation has taken the RPC scientists somewhat by surprise. The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased by a factor of about 10,000.

@findrangers Issue 5 is now available for purchase online. 80 pages. Perfect bound. Featuring the work of 80 international photographers. Get yours today. Click the link in my BIO #findrangers #shootfilm (via http://instagram.com/p/vPzuZNqusk/)

“Surfing is expressive of one’s innermost being. How you surf expresses who you are; what you click is expressive of your identity and fetishes. I think that writers try too hard to express themselves. Just by merely clicking, we are expressing ourselves. The new memoir is our browser history.”

A book on the 10th congress of the Communist party, center, in an abandoned home in Kanitz, a mostly empty village in Bulgaria. Of approximately 50 houses, only 3 are inhabited - totaling its population to 6. Bulgaria has the most extreme population decline in the world - mostly due to post-1989 emigration, and visions of severe structural and industrial decay are becoming increasingly common across the country. There are so few people of childbearing age people here that population statistics project a 34% decrease by 2050, from 7.7 million to 5 million.
Follow me this week as I bridge Bulgaria’s communist past with photos gleaned from family albums, to its current state of democracy 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This project was supported by a grant from The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Photo by @yanapaskova in October. #bulgaria #depopulation #communism #autocracy #berlinwallanniversary #1989 #pulitzercenter (via http://instagram.com/p/u_w4B7luk4/)

Under WA law, Aboriginal traditional owners have no legal right to stop mining, but they can negotiate land access compensation. A few confidential deals have been settled for multimillion-dollar sums — 0.5 per cent of production value — with protection for important sacred sites agreed to by big miners keen to avoid costly legal delays like the prolonged Yindjibarndi dispute. But according to a Fortescue spokesman, Andrew Forrest does not believe in big dollar “mining welfare”, saying it doesn’t help Aboriginal people, and this is why Fortescue is offering an annual compensation package of $10 million for the Solomon mine project. […] They say they will mine 60 million tonnes a year at first, rising to 100 million tonnes or more in future. That 60 million is worth around $10 billion at today’s prices and these are rising all the time.

Hello, #echosight ! My name is Dan Cristea @dan.cristea , a designer & photographer located in #Toronto, Canada. This week I’ll be taking over the echosight Instagram account along with my friend Richard @koci Hernandez and share some of our double-exposures collaborations. We hope that you will enjoy! Edit by @dan.cristea •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• “So, to praise others for their virtues can but encourage one’s own efforts”

“Looking back from twentieth-century text-generating experiments to Llull and the I Ching, it is important to recognize that, as Peterson (1983) reminds us, When computer programmers and a few poets first produced machine poems based on much the same principle as that of Tristan Tzara … they did not see themselves as the odious speculators in Swift’s Academy of Lagado, nor as poets in the Dada tradition. Mostly, they were light-hearted experimenters, trying to discover the word-manipulation possibilities of a new machine. (137)”

Here we show that error-corrected quantum memories installed in cargo containers and carried by ship could provide a flexible and scalable connection between local networks, enabling low-latency, high-fidelity quantum communication across global distances. With recent demonstrations of quantum technology with sufficient fidelity to enable topological error correction, implementation of the necessary quantum memories is within reach, and effective bandwidth will increase with improvements in fabrication. Thus, our architecture provides a new approach to quantum networking that avoids many of the technological requirements of undersea quantum repeaters, providing an alternate path to a worldwide Quantum Internet.

At about 11 a.m. local time today, supertyphoon Rammasun was in the South China Sea not far from Hong Kong. Landsat 8 took this image of its eye as it was traveling west-northwest, toward Hainan and mainland China. In the eyewall – the windiest area, surrounding the relatively calm eye – there were gusts of about 250 km/h (150 mph). The eye itself is about 40 km (25 mi) across in this image, and huge wind-driven waves are just visible under its swirling low clouds. Rammasun has already passed over the Philippines, doing significant damage, and is now forecast to head inland along the China/Vietnam border. (via http://instagram.com/p/qmoV4sTeSD/)

The largest ships in the world are built on Geoje Island, South Korea. This May, Landsat 8 had a clear view of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, better known as DSME. It’s one of three world-class shipyards in the country. One of the others, Samsung Heavy Industries, is a 40-minute bus ride away on the other side of the island. DSME has the contract to build the Maersk Triple-E ships, which are 400 m (a quarter of a mile) long and can carry more than 18,000 standard shipping containers. When empty, they weigh as much as the Titanic did fully loaded. Even their propellers are so large that the metal takes a week to cool after casting. Their size allows them to be more efficient and more environmentally friendly than typical cargo ships. Three are visible at docks here, with their sterns (back sections) painted red. This image is about 9 km (6 mi) on each side. (via http://instagram.com/p/ugl_21TeRY/)

This map offers an alternative way to browse the 2,619,833 images contained in the Internet Archive’s book collection. It shows 5500 different subjects which have been algorithmically arranged by their thematic relationships. The size of each link resembles the amount of images that are available for that topic. Clicking on a link will open the flickr page containing all the pictures for that subject.